Re/Cognition 

- on cognition, and on the historicity of listening: Embodied listening, embedded listening, enacted listening, extended listening

The aim in the following section is to unfold several 4E cognition perspectives on the design and intent of the project. 

Some parts of these reflections will relate closely to other sections of the exposition, in terms of questions about audience roles, genre, listening, body and memory.

(1)

The audience’s participation – through their vocal cords, and a state of alert listening, anticipating ‘whether to sing along now or later’ – can be seen as directly determining both the listening and participation in this concert format and is an embodied, corporeal activity and experience. That the audience’s understanding of the event and of what is going on is largely processed through the body. This perspective contains a cognition aspect as well as a genre aspect. Through the bodily activation of the audience, it becomes clear that this is a different kind of concert format than we are used to in post-tonal improvised music. The body realises, already pre-linguistically, that this format, from a bodily perspective, defines its own hybrid genre. Thus, the way we experience the music is shaped by bodily sensations, emotions, and prior experiences, affecting both audible-visible responses and inner reactions.

(2)

The body feels the music, the body feels its own participation in the music, and the body recalls – often unconsciously – how this music connects to previous bodily sing-along activities within the same songs. These symbolic layers in the music – that elements are recognised as pointing to something that the audience already knows – are partly contained in this embodiedness. The symbol-reading, heritage-oriented part of the experience also becomes an inherent (intrinsic) element in the bodily sensing; an embodied, cultural-historical situatedness. And, one might add, this symbol-reading layer is doubly embedded both in the listener’s embodied interaction with the material and in the listener’s cultural baggage (embedded listening). Therefore, we are dealing with a clarification of how the cultural heritage, and the symbolic layer in the music, appears as embedded in the experience and of how both the audience and the entire concert format are again embedded in (inseparable from) a larger cultural context. Perhaps even broader generalisations are possible here: a symbol-reading, heritage-resonating relationship as inseparable from any bodily experience of art; a subconscious, symbol-recognising reading of any gestalt as – through the body – relating the same gestalt to existing habits, values, norms, and practices.

This also raises the question of whether a non-referential listening experience is even possible when the material, as it clearly is in this project, is laden with cultural codes. The notion of a ‘pure’ listening that ‘impartially’ only relates to frequencies, overtone distributions, textures and elements, detached from a cultural-historical reality, collapses in the encounter with this project because the aesthetics of the project, through its cultural-historical embeddedness, automatically places the relation to cultural history in the listener’s bodily memory experience. 

(3)

When discussing an embodied cognition perspectives of the project, it must be mentioned that the listener’s experience and understanding are inseparable from the listener’s active participation, the listener’s enacted reaction to the musical totality. The listener not only perceives but also performs their understanding (enacted listening), through their participation – not only as a metaphor but concretely, as actively singing. The audience’s understanding and experience of the music cannot be separated from this action. 

(4)

Likewise, the existence of Højskolesangbogen, as a cultural, institutional phenomenon, but also as a physical artefact, becomes obviously understandable from a cognitive perspective as a tool that constitutes our extended cognition of what is going on. Beyond being a songbook that we refer to, Højskolesangbogen also in itself functions as a cognitive system, outside of ourselves, that defines our understanding of a larger complex of information, culture and emotions. This idea could also be described using the term apparatus (Niels Bohr, Karen Barad, and others); that our understanding not only of the musical genre, but of a number of musical and cultural entities, is dependent on, conditioned by, and created through a number of cultural conventions, concepts, institutions – and objects. These objects can be seen as having been assigned a meta-ontological status, based on which they influence how we perceive the world and its phenomena. In this light, it becomes plausible that Højskolesangbogen, not unlike the Western concept of “contemporary art,” constitutes a form of apparatus that determines what we can hear in or think about the music we experience.

In the four sections above, an attempt has been made to suggest possible future research on cognitive science around this theme: imagining possible scientific investigations into what cognitively happens for the audience and musicians during the project’s concert format, from a 4E cognition perspective. Questions explored could include:

- How do bodily experiences and activities shape our perceptions and understandings in hybrid artistic encounters, in which modes of response from different artistic conventions are mixed together?

- How do artworks, genres, and cultural artefacts function as extended cognitive tools, and how do they define our perceptions, experiences, and understandings of complex (hybrid genre) situations?

- How is the cultural-historical situatedness of an artistic experience present as a bodily reality for the listener, as embodied experience, even pre-linguistically? 

Echoes from Reading II: The Lure of Genre 

“(...) I submit for your consideration the following hypothesis: a text would not belong to any genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text, there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging.”^[1]

At the centre of this project is an encounter between genres, an encounter that is at once utopian/impossible and tangibly real. To understand both the impossibility and the reality of this meeting, as well as what it entails from each starting position, I will make a digression on Derrida’s thoughts on genre, destabilisation, and nontranscendent reading. Through the exploration, I aim to demonstrate how the project, through its practice, tests these forces and phenomena.

In Derrida’s work, a recurring point is that contemporary artistic genres inherently contain destabilising forces, a concept he illustrates through numerous readings of modernist literature. Genres, according to Derrida, are constituted not only by the repetitions and confirmations that allow us to recognise them but also by the ongoing changes, ruptures, and destabilisations that arise from the artistic ambitions of each genre. 

For example, in a transcribed interview with Derek Attridge, Derrida discusses literary works by Mallarmé, Joyce, Celan, Bataille, Artaud, and Blanchot: 

“... These ‘20th century modernist, or at least nontraditional texts’ all have in common that they are inscribed in a critical experience of literature. They bear within themselves, or we could also say in their literary act they put to work, a question, the same one, but each time singular and put to work otherwise: ‘What is literature?’ or ‘Where does literature come from?’ ‘What do we do with literature?’ These texts operate a sort of turning back, they are themselves a sort of turning back on the literary institution.”^[2]

And, in the same interview: 

“Every literary work ‘betrays’ the dream of a new institution of literature. It betrays it first by revealing it: each work is unique and is a new institution unto itself. But it also betrays it in causing it to fail: insofar as it is unique, it appears in an institutional field designed so that it cuts itself up and abducts itself there…”^[3]

Within the institution of (the concept of) contemporary art, the destabilisation is, in a way, permanent, making it impossible to fully define contemporary artistic genres as they are in a state of constant flux. In his reading of Kafka’s “Before the Law”, in the essay of the same name, Derrida sharpens this point:

“But is it not necessary for all literature to exceed literature? [Mais n'y a-t-il pas lieu, pour toute littérature, de déborder la littérature?] What would be a literature that would be only what it is, literature? It would no longer be itself if it were itself.”^[4]

Just as in literature, Derrida’s primary field of interest, I would argue that the same applies to much of modern music history, including post-jazz, improvisation, and contemporary Western composed music – genres that have been central to my own artistic practice. In other words, the ideal of challenging established expectations is a crucial part of the ethos with which my own musical aesthetics approach the world – and thus, in this project, the Højskolesangbogen songbook. Here, I refer not only to the gradual historical evolution of all forms of expression over time but also to the ideal that each work of art must “make it new,”^[5] challenge expectations, and so on. 

A counterargument to the mythology of the artwork as possessing the capacity and ambition to break with the established might claim that, since the transition from modernism to (among other things) postmodernism, it has been the work itself that creates the expectations it then breaks. In a world where “everything has already been done” (understood as an aesthetic sentiment, not a historical or structural fact), the artwork cannot surprise without first establishing the frameworks, expectations, and norms that it later subverts. However, this objection does not alter the fundamental point here: to understand the part of the project’s genre encounter that consists of my own aesthetic background and preferences, one must understand that embedded in this aesthetic is a search for where and how it is possible to find the new perspective, the new perception, the new approach to the material.

In contrast to this, the project’s genre encounter also involves the tradition of the Højskolesangbogen songbook, which dates back to at least 1894 when the first edition of the songbook was published. This is a tradition in which the genre destabilisation that Derrida describes is taking place many orders of magnitude slower. Over the past 50 years, new editions have been published roughly every 15 years (1974, 1989, 2006, 2020), or approximately twice per generation. And while there may be very strong, relevant and worldly reasons for the inclusion of new songs in each edition, I would guess that a sing-along version of, say, “Se nu stiger solen”^[6] in a Danish gymnasium or folk high school in 2023 will not sound significantly different from what it would have in 1973. 

The contrast could be articulated more plainly with the following line of thought: one could argue that all contemporary art exists in a tension between the recognisable and the unfamiliar. If a work consists only of pure recognisability, then it is questionable whether it can truly be considered art. Conversely, if there is no recognisability whatsoever, the statement may become cognitively irrelevant, even to our sensory perception. Yet, notions of when there is sufficiently much or sufficiently little recognisability in the statement will, by nature, vary greatly depending on whether we are looking at a concert form perceived as related to the concept of art or a community singing event.

It is thus my contention that there are profound differences in the musical, artistic, and cultural perceptions brought to the encounter between the two genres: the Højskolesangbogen songbook tradition and art music / improvised music / post-jazz. Drawing once again on Derrida, I will point to various conceptions of what an artwork (or a song) is. In the Kafka essay “Before the Law,” Derrida outlines several axioms we “apparently” agree on when reading a text, including:

1) the text has “its own identity, singularity, and unity,” and that these are “inviolable” ...

2) “the text has an author”; ...

3) in the text, events are related, “... and the relation belongs to what we call literature,” ... and 

4) “we think we know what a title is.”^[7]

To some extent, these four axioms, described here as preconceptions of what a literary (or artistic) work consists of, can be applied to the songs in Højskolesangbogen: 

1) All songs have their own identity, they are different-from, not-to-be-confused-with, not-to-be-mixed-with, other songs. 

2) All songs from after 1800 were authored by someone. If the author or composer is either living or died less than 70 years ago, the song is still owned by the copyright holders or their heirs. This means that while anyone can sing the songs, recording them requires permission. Similarly, although singing along to the best of one’s (perhaps limited) ability is of course allowed, changing the works, making new arrangements, or quoting the song within another piece of music requires permission.

3) All the songs are related to one another through their mutual role as Højskolesangbogen songs, and all verses within each song are interconnected. However, songs are not typically considered “violated” if some verses are omitted. 

4) Every song has a title. Following Derrida, we think we know what it means for a song to have a title. For the newer songs still under copyright, this means the title must accompany the song, even in short quotations. Ontologically, the title also suggests a clearly defined boundary, a kind of cultural membrane around the work, delineating what music belongs within the song and what music does not.

Some of these readings of Derrida’s axioms highlight areas where the conflicting preconceptions in the project’s genre encounter collide with a clash: The notion of a song or work as unchangeable represents a legal framework around the exchange of cultural expressions, which we usually see as allowing space for free expression in a free society. Yet, at the same time, we find ourselves in a double position (superposition...), where the song is both entrusted to the public, who may sing and perform the song as they see fit, and subject to a kind of veto power from copyright owners. 

And at the heart of the project is the ambition to transform these songs to such an extent that it raises the question of whether we truly know what a title is. The project’s approach to the musical and artistic transformation of the material also suggests that songs need not be treated as having an inviolable identity. Similarly, the project questions whether we who reinterpret the songs owe the original copyright holders any kind of loyalty. 

Nontranscendent reading – Nontranscendent listening 

Another schism that intersects both the aesthetic domain of the project and Derrida’s thinking is the question of the possibility of nontranscendent reading/listening. Derrida speaks – critically – of the tendency towards a transcendent reading, where the reader is looking for what the text is about, outside the text – in Derrida’s own words “... that search for the signified, which we put here in question.”^[8] He also talks about the text simultaneously offering itself (“lend(s) itself”) to a nontranscendent reading:

“Literature has no pure originality in this regard. A philosophical, or journalistic or scientific discourse, can be read in ‘nontranscendent’ fashion. ‘Transcend’ here means going beyond interest for the signifier, the form, the language (note that I do not say ‘text’) in the direction of the meaning or referent (this is Sartre's rather simple but convenient definition of prose). One can do a nontranscendent reading of any text whatever.” ^[9]

And shortly thereafter:

“... it is not enough to suspend the transcendent reading to be dealing with literature, to read a text as a literary text (...) In any case, a text cannot by itself avoid lending itself to a ‘transcendent’ reading. A literature which forbade that transcendence would annul itself.”^[10]

What I aim to highlight here is that the same discussion is very much related to the question of listening. Is there such a thing as a nontranscendent listening that does not search for what the music represents, refers to, points to? In what contexts is such a type of listening an ideal, and when is it even sensorially, cognitively, or culturally and historically possible? In terms of music philosophy, this question is closely related to concepts of acousmatic listening (Pierre Schaeffer, et al.), and acousmatic aesthetics, where it is (freely rephrased) formulated as an ideal that the listener does not search for what the sound consists of, represents or refers to when listening. More indirectly, the discussion overlaps with Pauline Oliveros’ deep listening practices,^[11] where many of Oliveros’ listening instructions point to direct relationships between sound, listener, body, and an attentive awareness – but where the referential aspect, the sound’s pointing to other existing cultural material, remains rather invisible. In both Pierre Schaeffer’s and Pauline Oliveros’ aesthetics, this underemphasis of the contextual-referential dimension of human auditory perception can make sense. However, in the encounter between a listener-spectator singing along to our project’s hybrid concerts, it also points to a paradox that vibrates throughout the project: 

The listener encounters an unfamiliar instrumental aesthetic that surrounds the well-known song, anticipates it, but also deviates significantly from how the familiar song usually sounds, is experienced, and feels.

In the listener’s experience, how does the referentiality of music (Derrida: the transcendence of the work) operate? How does the referential pointing beyond what is actually heard – a pointing towards something that has been ‘designated’ (signifié) – function?

And in the freely improvised section, where it has not yet been communicated whether we have entered the ‘cell membrane’ of the next song, is it possible – or even necessary – to listen to the music as music, not as song accompaniment, in order to fully experience it?

Are we listening to what the music represents? How it was made? What it reminds us of? How it deviates from what we expected just half a minute ago? Or simply to what it is?

I find it an intriguing paradox in the project that its concert format simultaneously invites the listener to experience an improvised performance as what it is, that is, to listen as though the improvisation does not refer to anything familiar – and, at the same time, that the sometimes very clear reference to well-known material causes the sound to cease being merely sound and become a symbol.

My question is therefore: In this project, is it possible to practise such a not-culturally-embedded, nontranscendent listening? Is it even cognitively possible in other contexts? Or are the cultural allusions always so strongly present that we must conclude there is always a text beyond the text when it comes to music, namely the interaction of music with our memory?

^[1]Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre," in Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 230.

^[2]Derrida, interview, 41.

^[3]Derrida, interview, 73.

^[4]Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 215.

^[5] Ezra Pound.

^[6] Lyrics by Jakob Knudsen 1890, melody by Oluf Ring, 1915.

^[7]Derrida, “Before the Law,” 184–188.

^[8]Derrida, in Acts of Literature, 43.

^[9]Ibid., 44.

^[10]Ibid., 45.

^[11]Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (New York: iUniverse, 2005).